Welcome Back, explorers.

We're thrilled to announce that Distant Worlds 2: Return of the Shakturi, the first feature expansion for the acclaimed 4X space strategy game Distant Worlds 2, will be launched on the 24th of October. Prepare yourself for an epic new chapter in the Distant Worlds saga, as an ancient and sinister force reawakens to threaten the very fabric of the galaxy.

In this expansion, the galaxy faces the terrifying return of the Shakturi, a powerful alien faction whose last invasion nearly obliterated all life.

• Genetic Engineering in the game introduces a brand-new space creature and allows the Shakturi to manufacture these creatures for scouting and combat. It also grants the Shakturi influence over existing space creatures in the galaxy, enabling them to use these creatures to further their own goals.
  
• Biowarfare enables the Shakturi to deploy plagues that weaken other factions, making them more susceptible to Psychic influence and control.
  
• Psychic Abilities enhance the Shakturi's effectiveness in space and ground combat, diplomacy, espionage, and research. Countering these abilities requires innovative strategies that could potentially turn the Shakturi's strengths into weaknesses.
  
• Planet Destroyers and Mega Ships are powerful tools available to all factions, including those introduced post-release. These formidable assets are crucial in battles against the Shakturi, with Mega Ships offering unique functionalities, such as the Quameno Mobile Robotic Troop Foundry.
  
• New Space Creature – The Rift Strider introduces fresh challenges and opportunities within the game.
  
• Outposts allow factions to establish a presence on worlds unsuitable for full colonization, securing valuable territory for future expansion.
  
• The Multi-Empire Alliance System introduces new ways to coordinate and cooperate with allies, enhancing strategic collaboration across empires.
  
• New Space-based start with just a single colony ship and a small fleet.
  
• Ancient Guardian Vaults and Special Artifacts add depth to exploration and gameplay.

On August 26th Erik Rutins, producer and co-designer of Distant Worlds 2, gave a sneak peak of the new DLC Return of the Shakturi. In case you missed the stream, you can watch it here:
To celebrate the announcement of Return of the Shakuri, starting at 18.00 GMT, Distant Worlds 2 will take part to the Space Exploration Fest.
Check all the details here.

Prepare for a galaxy-shattering crisis unlike any other. The Shakturi are back, and only the bravest and most cunning of explorers will be able to stop their return. Will you be ready?

The Galaxy lives on

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2926560/Distant_Worlds_2_Return_of_the_Shakturi/

An ancient evil returns to the galaxy—will you be ready?
The producer and co-designer Erik Rutins did a preview stream of the new upcoming DLC Return of The Shakturi

We send greetings once again to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community.
As before, Elliot and I would like to thank our players for their patience and support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. 2023 saw our first two expansions for Distant Worlds 2 along with four Major updates (Aurora, Hyperspeed, Discovery and Fleet). We continued improving DW2 with the free "Game Faction" update in April, which followed a series of public beta updates. In addition to a wide range of other improvements, the Game Faction update included the first base game faction refresh with the Humans and Mortalen being brought up to a similar level as the new DLC factions.

After the release of that update, we announced that we would pause the update releases for a bit while focusing on the development of the first full expansion for Distant Worlds 2 - "The Return of the Shakturi".


The Current State of the Game
After the “Aurora” update resolved the worst technical issues with the initial release, the “Hyperspeed” update massively improved performance and the “Discovery” update gave us a revamped Hive and some improved Pirates as well as the first Ancient Guardian Vaults, the “Fleet” update released as official in November with many improvements to automated and manual fleet and ship behaviors. The "Game Faction" update then further improved various fleet and ship behaviors as well as improving the gameplay for the Human and Mortalen factions in various ways. Throughout these updates we continue to improve almost all gameplay areas as well as the AI, which is now much more competent and challenging than it was a year ago. You can see a summary of all the changes in the update announcements, there are far too many to go over here but if you haven’t updated lately we recommend it!

The feedback on the "Game Faction" update was overall quite positive. We know there are more issues to resolve, more UI improvements and AI improvements to make and we've made some of these behind the scenes while working on "Return of the Shakturi". Others will follow along with the "Shakturi" release or with the update after that.

We've also been working to update more base game factions as well as continue to tweak the DLC factions where appropriate. The Boskara and Zenox will be the next base factions updated.

The main change to our schedule has been a longer delay in the updates and future DLCs than originally expected because of the amount of work we've been putting into "Return of the Shakturi", which adds a proper endgame crisis to DW2 along with many other changes and improvements. The initial internal test and development stage for that has taken more time, but we are determined to make right and make it well. We expect a wider beta test to begin in August and we plan to officially announce "Return of the Shakturi" and start speaking more about its features before the end of August, 2024. That announcement will also include the official release date.

We have had some parallel work going on the next faction DLC after the Shakturi, which I expect we'll speak more about after "Return of the Shakturi" expansion releases.

While we are a small team, we are committed to both continuing to expand the game with new DLCs and expansions but also to continue updating and improving the base game through our ongoing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.

Our next areas to focus on are listed below…


Future Priorities
I've included all those we listed in our previous roadmap to comment on those we completed and those that are partially completed or still in progress.
In Progress:
1. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released DLCs when it comes to faction and government gameplay differentiation. Completed for the Humans and Mortalen, still in progress for the other base factions.
2. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. We plan to also add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues. There were major improvements in these areas in the "Fleet" and "Game Faction" updates. We continue to make improvements in this area as part of our work for "Return of the Shakturi".
3. Further improvements to pathing issues as well as pathfinding performance. There are long-standing issues which in some cases result in sub-optimal paths as well as ridiculous paths around the galaxy. We plan to review the area of storms and galactic terrain to make sure that they are providing the gameplay benefits we were hoping to see and if not, we will rebalance them. We are also looking into the question of making it easier to plan jumps that do not require star system waypoints. Major improvements to the long-standing issues were made in the "Game Faction" update. More improvements continue as part of the Shakturi development work.
4. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management and diplomatic/military grand strategy. We’ve also seen more feedback and suggestions on the population policy side, specific to slavery but also other policies. We plan to revisit the design of these in the future and also improve the AI’s management of population policies. The "Return of the Shakturi" development is leading to many AI improvements across the board, but especially related to the prosecution of wars.


Completed:
1. Improve the appearance of empire borders, adding a thicker border line at the edges of an empire to help distinguish it from nearby empires with similar flags and colors.
2. Further improvements to ship auto-design and auto-upgrade to better consider nebula/storm defenses as well as existing weapon component categories and sizes for the upgrade system, so that players will find the upgrade tool more generally useful and so the AI empires will be better able to manage your empire and their own when it comes to navigating the galactic terrain. We plan to improve the policy settings which allow players to specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize. Specifically we want to allow this to affect other components beyond weapons and also to allow “do not use this” to be a choice, so the AI can be guided to specialize its automatic designs more. This is completed for now, though we have plans for additional features here in the future.


To Be Addressed:
1. Improve quality of life for manual players further. We have already made a series of improvements here, but our plan includes returning the full manual play functionality of DW1. While DW2 includes quite a few new semi-automated features which can help with manual play, for example the global queues and fleet and army templates that were not in DW1, we recognize that many players are still missing tools that would make manual play more enjoyable. Next in line as a large task are ship and fleet order queueing as well as a lot of additional minor improvements to various UI areas.
2. Improve message handling further, especially regarding attack notification message spam and repeating advisor messages. We plan to add additional message filters for “all Pirates” and “all Empires” and rethink and improve the message purge system. We also hope to add the ability to tell an advisor “do not suggest this again” or to tell a Pirate or an Empire “do not contact me again with this offer”.
3. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function. A new Distance Measurement tool is in the latest public beta update already.
4. Modding support will continue to be a priority. We’ve expanded this greatly since release, including the addition of an in-game mod manager, Steam Workshop support and much better handling of multiple mods. We also recently added support for code modding and have been working on a new open source tool to make both data and bundle modding easier. (Further modding improvements are a priority after "Return of the Shakturi" releases)

There are also other reported issues beyond those above which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are our current highest priority goals. We have been compiling master lists of all issue reports by category and as our time allows, we work our way through these areas to make sure we continue to improve the player experience with DW2.


Future Expansions
As always, the Content and Art teams are not heavily involved in most of the game fixes we’ve been working through, so they have been spending most of their time working on future releases.
Our first priority is the “Return of the Shakturi” expansion, which will release in 2024. Stay tuned for our official announcement in late August which will reveal the release date later this year..
This is our main priority and will finally give DW2 a major end-game threat to pit your fully developed empire against, with a much more developed story and new gameplay options and research areas. This will be a feature expansion, rather than just a content expansion and some future feature support (such as planet destroyers and mega-ships for each faction and certain unique research branches) will depend on features in “Return of the Shakturi”. This has taken more time than originally expected, but we are giving it the time it needs to make sure the endgame is fully tested and fun.

We now plan to release a third “Factions” DLC content expansion in Q1 2025 (exact timing dependent on how much time Return of the Shakturi needs). This will add the Wekkarus and Atuuk to the game. The Wekkarus are among the most ancient and mysterious aliens in DW2 with possible connections to the Shakturi. The Atuuk are space lemmings of a sort who were just barely smart enough to figure out FTL. This DLC will work fine whether you have “Return of the Shakturi” or not, but will have some additional features/content related to that expansion if you have it.
Work has also begun on the fourth "Factions" DLC for 2025. All we can say about that now is that it includes the Securans and the Naxxilians.
We are also in the planning stages for the next feature expansion after "Return of the Shakturi" but that's all I can say about that for now.
Update Schedule
Our public update schedule has slowed down considerably due to "Return of the Shakturi" development, though internally we're already on version 1.2.4.3! We expect to resume the public update releases in the next month or two.
As before, we will be aiming for a bi-weekly public beta update schedule. It will generally take 6-12 weeks of beta updates to get to an update that is stable enough to become official. This means we expect public beta updates roughly every two weeks and new free official updates every 2-3 months once public updates resume.


Our Thanks
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for your support of Distant Worlds 2. Please check in regularly going forward and try the newest beta updates if you’d like to see how things are shaping up.
Please stay tuned for more information on the Return of the Shakturi expansion in the late August announcement and on the following Faction DLCs after the Return of the Shakturi release later this year.

Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce

This update includes a refresh of the Human and Mortalen factions as well as many other changes, including improved border graphics and a new visualization for Fleet Engagement ranges. Future updates will cover the remaining base game factions until all are refreshed.

BASE FACTION AND GOVERNMENT REFRESH

This update includes a refresh of the Human and Mortalen base game factions as well as all the base game government types. A summary of changes is below, but for the full information, please read through the in-game faction and government descriptions carefully. There are also new event illustrations and loading screens to go along with these changes.

FLEET AND SHIP BEHAVIORS

We added additional Fleet Engagement ranges and a new map overlay for engagement range visualization to help you plan your fleet home bases, engagement ranges and targets.

GAME SPEED

We recommend only using x8 speed sparingly, as it can be too easy to miss important notifications otherwise.

- added new x8 and x1/8 game speed controls.


For those eager to delve into the nitty-gritty details of the changes, a detailed changelog is available here[www.matrixgames.com], detailing everything from major enhancements to minor bug fixes.

Play Now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531540/Distant_Worlds_2/

Hello everyone and thank you for your interest in Distant Worlds 2!

One of the points of feedback we heard from the base game release was that even though the factions had more to differentiate themselves from each other than in the original Distant Worlds, players wanted more differentiation in the gameplay between factions.

Since the release of the base game, we’ve created and released two DLCs, adding a total of four new factions to the game (the Ikkuro, Dhayut, Quameno and Gizurean), each with their own unique gameplay, story, ships, techs and capabilities. The development for these DLCs also added new features to the game to allow for more faction differentiation and to date, these faction DLCs have been well received.

We announced after the release of the Ikkuro and Dhayut DLC that we would also begin an effort to refresh the gameplay for all of the base game factions to make them more unique and bring them up to the level of the DLC factions. The upcoming “Game Faction Update” marks the beginning of updating the base game factions.

This update includes a refresh of the Human and Mortalen factions as well as all the base Government types. There are many other changes, including improved border graphics and a new visualization for Fleet Engagement ranges. Future updates will gradually cover the remaining base game factions until all are refreshed. Next up are the Zenox and Boskara and after that, the Teekan and Haakonish.

I will summarize the faction and government changes below, but for the full information, please read through the in-game faction and government descriptions carefully once the update is officially released. There are also new event illustrations and loading screens to go along with these changes.

The Humans

The Humans are understandably the most played faction and we also have looked at them as an entry point to the game for most, so we wanted them to be able to support a variety of playstyles.
They are now slightly better at living on Continental worlds and have a new conditional event which grants a new free Colonization tech advance when you colonize a new Continental world (you can receive this bonus once per planet).

For those focused on Trade or Tourism, we changed their Great Art Exposition from a faction event on a timer to a better conditional event which triggers whenever you sign a Free Trade Agreement or build a new Resort Base. It grants you a Trade and Tourism income throughout your empire along with a boost to Colony income and Tourism for the colony where the Great Art Exposition is held, but you can’t trigger it more than once every 5 years.

When war is declared on your Human empire, you now may choose either a new Admiral or new General with two positive traits when the “Hero of the Hour” event triggers, reflecting the Human ability to compete in the military sphere.

Internal divisions among Humans are reflected through “Internal Debates”, which reduces happiness throughout your empire, but also grants you a capable new Ambassador when you sign a new Defense treaty.

When a foreign intelligence mission against you succeeds (but is detected) you may now choose to spend a Spy to gain a +20% boost to Counter Espionage along with a small decrease to Colony Happiness throughout your empire for the next 2 years, helping Humans with a more Espionage-driven playstyle.

Humans now have Carriers which are larger than those of other factions, allowing them to either fit more starfighters or just be more well-rounded fighting ships.

We also added new Leader, Ambassador, Scientist, Spy character traits and expanded all the Human unique tech trees to make them more useful and accessible earlier in the research tree.

Humans also now have a new unique facility, the Foundation for Galactic Cooperation, which boosts Diplomacy, Espionage, PsyOps, Concealment and Trade.

Finally, we went through and reviewed and fixed any issues with the Human race-specific victory conditions.

The Mortalen

The Mortalen are disciplined, reliable, loyal but very militaristic. They can be your best friend if you invest in getting along with them or your worst enemy if you cross them. We wanted to use the new faction tech we had available to build on their militaristic way of dealing with the galaxy and give our more warlike players a fun experience.

Mortalen troops now gain experience and revcover faster than before and the Mortalen are also better at Armor Research, about which more below.

The previous timed faction events “Warrior Wave” and “Patriotic Wave” are now conditional events. Warrior Wave now triggers when you declare war and lets you choose between a boost to Population Growth and Troop Recruitment or a boost to Troop Attack Strength for 2 years. Patriotic Wave now triggers when war is declared on you and gives you a choice of Population Growth and either Corruption Reduction or War Weariness Reduction.

Any of these choices will help you in wartime, but it will be your choice how best to respond.
When you invade and conquer an enemy world you will now trigger “Know Your Enemy” as the Mortalen tacticians study their foes, allowing you to choose a 2 year boost to either Espionage and Counter Espionage or Targeting and Countermeasures.

Periodically you will also be asked to choose between two characters, always picked from your Leader, Admirals and Generals. Whoever you choose will undergo a trial of arms, with a good chance to succeed and gain a positive trait and a smaller chance to fail and gain a negative trait. This will also help develop the most experienced Admirals and Generals, which are relevant for your victory conditions, if these trials go well for you.

All Mortalen ship and spaceport hulls now have +1 Reactive Armor rating, making their ships harder to destroy, especially in the early game. The Mortalen also receive a new unique Armor tech called Block Armor, which has its own sub-tree and has a higher Reactive rating than standard armor.

There are also new unique Leader, Admiral, General, Ambassador character traits and the other Mortalen unique techs were expanded as with the Human ones.

Finally, we went through and reviewed and fixed any issues with the Mortalen race-specific victory conditions.

The Governments

We revisited every base game Government type and added some unique gameplay to each of them. One of the most changed, which I’ll review here, is Feudalism. Feudalism is a relatively unstable type of government in that leadership changes at the top tend to be very disruptive, but it now gains several very interesting features to compensate for those periodic disruptions and rebellions.

In a Feudal Empire, your Private Economy can now build individual Feudal Escorts for its own Escort, Guard and Patrol missions. You will see these marked with a Star in your ship list and it will state that they are not state-controlled. You will not be able to give them orders, but they will help keep your space safer from lower level threats such as pirates and creatures, without costing you any State income or maintenance.

Feudalism also gets upgraded Planetary Militia which fights like Infantry without upgrades. This is a big strength increase which makes Feudal worlds significantly harder to conquer.
Finally, Feudal Obligations will double your Troop Recruitment Rate 2 years after War declaration and your Troops gain experience 25% faster.

I hope this article gives you a good preview of what’s coming in the Game Faction update and that these free improvements will increase your enjoyment of Distant Worlds 2. Thanks again for your support!

Dear Explorers,

Another free update, "the Game Faction Update," is scheduled for release on April 9th for all Distant World 2 players.

It marks the beginning of updating the base game factions to match the gameplay standards of the new factions introduced in post-release DLCs.

This update will include a refresh of the Human and Mortalen factions as well as many other changes, including improved border graphics and a new visualization for Fleet Engagement ranges. Future updates will cover the remaining base game factions until all are refreshed.

It will include additional Fleet Engagement ranges and a new map overlay for engagement range visualization to help you plan your fleet home bases, engagement ranges and targets.

This update, along with many other news and events, will be included in the free Game Faction Update, launching on April 9th.
That’s not all!

There will be a special streaming event with Erik Rutins, producer and co-designer of Distant Worlds 2, on March 26th at 13:00 PM GMT on our Twitch channel where he will pre-show the Game Faction update.

Be sure to tune in and join us for this special event.

The Galaxy lives on

Hello everyone and thank you for your interest in Distant Worlds 2!

One of the principles of Distant Worlds 2 from the start has been to add more “guided automation” to find a better middle ground for players between full manual play and fully automated play. Ship Design and Research are two of the key areas where we heard a great deal of feedback from players who wanted more guided automation.

In Ship Design, players have the option to fully automate this area, design all of their ships manually, or mix things up by assigning some ship roles to manual design and keeping others automated. The fully automated and mix and match players wanted more influence over how those automated designs looked and we agreed that this would be a good thing.

In order to fully achieve this goal, we also needed a way to better guide research (when it is automated) because the ships and bases that you can design depend in large part on the research you have done in terms of what components are available to you. It made sense to connect the two systems in order to achieve the desired end result.

We added an entirely new section to the Empire Polices to accomplish this goal and you can see a screenshot of that section above.

There are tooltips in the game to help explain the choices, but I will summarize how the system works here. For close-in weapons and stand-off weapons, you can choose a weapon category to prefer for research prioritization and ship design.

The automation will then focus your weapon research in those weapon categories and use those weapons in its automated designs. When a faction has a faction-unique component within these categories, it will be further preferred and weighted for research and design.

For example, you can see in the Mortalen ship below, that it has Blasters and Torpedoes as the preferences state, but in the choice of which Torpedo to use, the automation has researched and included the Mortalen-unique Pulse Torpedo.

There are other categories where the player can also choose the priority of a particular weapon type, which ship role should be the smallest to try to fit those weapon types in its designs and even state that he does not want that type of weapon used at all to free up space for other priorities.

For example, see the screenshot below of the choices for Ion Weapons. These three options give you maximum flexibility – if you don’t want Ion weapons on your ships at all, or you do want them but only on your Battleships, or you want lots of Ion weapons on all of your ships, you can achieve that through these automation policies. The same flexibility now applies to Intercept Weapons (Point Defense and Fighter weapons), Area Weapons and Bombard weapons.

Near the bottom of this new policy section are a few sections that are not about weapons. The first deals with Fighters and as with the above lets you pick how much you would like to prioritize Fighter Bays on your designs and which should be the smallest ship role with Starfighters.

The rest give you some choices on Reactors, Shields, Hyperdrives and Engines. In each of these component areas, the research tree offers you different paths. For example, you can see below the choices for Hyperdrives – you can choose to focus on Energy Efficiency, Jump Initiation Time or Speed. In the game, these are represented by the Kaldos, Calista-Dal and Equinox hyperdrive branches. Once you’ve picked one of these preferences, it will guide your automated research and design to focus on those components without manual involvement.

We plan to build on this system further in the future, adding additional preferences for Fighter designs and Civilian ship and base designs, as well as other requests the community may have.

We hope this feature review helps you understand how to use these new policies and that they make your time in Distant Worlds 2 more enjoyable!

Dear explorers,

We are pleased to announce that the Stellar update for Distant Worlds 2 is now available, bringing significant improvements to gameplay and overall game quality, enriching your interstellar journey through the galaxy.

This completely free update is to address stability issues, significantly reducing crashes and launch problems that players may have encountered previously. With these fixes in place, we aim to ensure a smoother and more seamless gameplay experience for all explorers

Enhanced Guided Ship Design
Embark on your voyages with newfound confidence as the Stellar update expands the policy system, offering enhanced guidance for automated research and ship design priorities. With a new Weapon and Component Focuses section added to Empire Policy settings, players can exert greater control over automated decisions, aligning research and ship designs more closely with their strategic objectives.

Refined User Interface
Discover a universe of possibilities with the addition of a new measurement tool, providing intuitive ways to gauge distances and plan your next move with precision. The user interface enhancements included in this update aim to streamline navigation and improve overall accessibility, ensuring that every aspect of your cosmic odyssey is within reach.

Charting a Clear Path
Navigate the cosmos with confidence as the Stellar update resolves commonly reported pathfinding issues, smoothing the way for seamless exploration and conquest. Whether charting courses through nebulous clouds or plotting trajectories across star-studded skies, your journeys will be guided by newfound clarity and efficiency.

AI Enhancements and Beyond
Experience a more dynamic and responsive galaxy with improvements to AI behavior, construction, diplomacy, colonization, and more. From the intricacies of interstellar politics to the challenges of managing burgeoning colonies, the Stellar update enriches every facet of gameplay, ensuring that each decision shapes the destiny of your empire.

Beyond the Stars
But the wonders of the Stellar update don't end there. For those eager to delve into the nitty-gritty details of the changes, a detailed changelog is available here[www.matrixgames.com], detailing everything from major enhancements to minor bug fixes.

Play Now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531540/Distant_Worlds_2/

Download the Stellar update now and embark on your most ambitious adventure yet

Welcome back explorers,

The day has come. The Fleet update, the latest major update for Distant Worlds 2, is out now and ready for you to discover.

The new Fleet major update includes many improvements across all areas of the game, but focuses most on the area of improving fleet and ship behavior in almost every way. With these new additions and improvements, players will be able to experience Distant Worlds 2 like never before.

But that's not all. For those of you who want to know every detail of the Fleet update, a detailed changelog is available here[ftp-us.matrixgames.com]. This document outlines all the changes made in the update, from major new features to minor bug fixes.

In case you didn't have the chance to watch Erik's stream on Distant Worlds 2 and its future, you can take a look at it here:

During the stream, Erik Rutins, producer and co-designer of Distant Worlds 2, previewed the Fleet update and the future of the game.

So don't waste any more time. Get ready to experience the latest version of Distant Worlds 2 and discover a new Galaxy.



The galaxy lives on

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531540/Distant_Worlds_2/